


Bargains and Blue Eyed Blondes

by petpluto



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Adultery, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Introspection, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 09:35:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/772705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petpluto/pseuds/petpluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“If you were such a great detective, you would have seen what was going on right under your nose.”</em>
</p><p>Keith always did see what was going on right under his nose. He just chose to ignore it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bargains and Blue Eyed Blondes

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: No matter how hard I wish it, they're not mine.
> 
>  
> 
> _This is what happens when I watch Veronica Mars Season One a lot in a row. I start really wondering who knew what, when._

“If you were such a great detective, you would have seen what was going on right under your nose.”

Celeste’s parting shot unnerves him, but not in the way she means it to. He is a good detective. He did see what was happening between Lianne and Jake Kane. Lianne would blush, when they would run into him and Celeste out and about. He heard plans not being made, and there were always oblique references being thrown out and around that he and Celeste just learned to ignore. Had to ignore, if they wanted to keep living in the dream where their spouses loved them most of all.

He thinks Lianne did love him. She never wanted him to know about Jake, and he obliged her by pretending he didn’t. He let her think he was too caught up in it, too caught up in her, to see clearly. He didn’t care. Back when he was so in love with Lianne, he thought eventually, it would stop. And then he thought, he didn’t mind that he had to share her, share her life, because the parts she had with Jake were cheap and tawdry, kept out from the light of day and out of the limelight. The parts she had with Jake were the ones she seemed ashamed of; and the parts she had with him, she showed the world.

He could live with his wife having someone else, if she came home to him. If she smiled for him. If she made her life with him. If she were proud of everything she built with him, the things they built together. It was a balance, and he struck it well.

But then, he didn’t care for a whole other reason. He fell in love, too. And he fell in love with a blurry image of something that could have been a raisin or could have been a baby. He fell, hard and fast, and Lianne wasn’t the center of his world, either. Someone else took her place, forced her to the side. And Lianne and what Lianne did in her spare time seemed less and less relevant when he had someone else to come home to. Someone who depended on his coming home.

He was the one who named her; not Celeste, not Jake, not even Lianne. He found the name, he offered it to Lianne, and he was the one who told the nurse - this is his daughter, Veronica Mars. He likes the weight of it - true image, of war. It is poetic in a way he rarely is. He offered it up without a hint of irony, too, because it is the truth. She is his true image, and he would go to war for her. He doesn’t care about any of the rest of it, the muck the rest of them wallow in. He has a daughter who thinks he hung the moon and all the stars in the sky. He has a daughter who is bright and brilliant and sweet and loving. He has a daughter. End of story.

He understands Celeste, more than she thinks. And he thinks that if he believed he had gotten less out of this deal than more, then he would be bitter as well. But he got Veronica out of this Faustian bargain, and she is more than enough to be salve on all wounds, old and new. Celeste, though, got a philandering spouse who showed a strange amount of interest in another woman’s child. She got that same child enmeshed in her life to a degree Keith thinks would have bothered even a saint. Veronica managed to charm Lilly and Duncan Kane, just as she managed to charm everyone else. But she was charmed by them as well, and he can see how being forced to interact with what Celeste sees as the embodiment of her life gone wrong would be upsetting under the best of circumstances

And these have never been the best of circumstances.

Veronica is his daughter. He knew that from the second she opened her big, blue eyes and stared at him solemnly. She is his daughter. He knew that when he saw Jake Kane staring at her in her bassinet at the hospital. She is his, and had the words “Baby Mars” labelled right there. Right across. She is his, because he is her father. He has claimed her, and he isn’t giving her up without a hell of a fight. He isn’t giving in to the fact that she may not be, biologically speaking, his. All the other facts back up what he knows, what he’s always known. Veronica is his.

Celeste’s parting shot doesn’t make him uncomfortable because it is true. It makes him uncomfortable, because she said it in front of Veronica. She is not one to let truths remain buried, to allow lies to be accepted as fact. If she didn’t already know, she probably now suspects. And a suspicious Veronica is a dangerous Veronica. Because a suspicious Veronica is one who will not stop until she is satisfied.

He knows this, because he made it his solemn vow to mold her that way. He made it his solemn vow that, no matter what that double helix says, Veronica carries on his best traits. Which, unfortunately, means she also carries a decent amount of his worse ones as well. Veronica carries him on in her, in everything she is and everything that she does.

Celeste hit him right where it hurts; and the sad thing is, she doesn’t even know how or why. She doesn't know it hurts because he always knew, and now he has to plan for the inevitability of Veronica knowing too.


End file.
